Improving Reuse of Test Strategy based on ISO/IEC Standards

A test plan is a high level document detailing objectives, processes, schedules and so on for verifying a developed software. And a test strategy, a component of a test plan, is about how to test software products to guarantee its quality and find bugs in the software in advance. Therefore, establishing effective and suitable test strategies is important for elaborating test processes. However, these tasks are difficult for project managers who write a test plan if they were not trained well in software test processes. And mis-designed test strategies will also mislead entire testing behaviors that testers would do. As a result, there would be a low quality software product in the end. To solve this problem, we propose a new test strategy reuse technique in this paper. By utilizing test plans of already completed software development projects, we lead test planer to reuse suitable and effective test strategies which were used in previous projects. To do so, we evaluate existing test strategies by utilizing ISO/IEC 25010 quality model for evaluating the suitability of test strategies and also use effectiveness metrics for test strategies. And from these evaluations, we predict completeness of new test plan that is written by reused test strategies. It can help the project manager to write an appropriate test plan for the quality characteristics which are selected as objectives for testing and software product. We show the possibility of our approach by implementing a prototype into the existing framework in a case study.